Dick Colgan savored the words as he read the headline on the clipping from the 1942 New York Daily Mirror. I didn’t blame him. How often do 10,000 people gather in the street to watch your father perform an act of heroism?

There were three of us sitting in the Miss Florence Diner— Colgan, his brother Andy and me. The Colgan boys were there to share the story behind the James Gordon Bennett medal won by their father, firefighter John Colgan.

The New York City Fire Department gives out exactly one such medal each year. When you answer the fire bell in New York City, that puts you on top of the heap.

Long before he moved the family to Florence, John Colgan lived in upstate New York, Sleepy Hollow country, with the emphasis on “sleepy.” When he came of age, he moved to the borough of the Bronx in New York City and started a family.

“He wanted to get out of Tarrytown to the big city,” Dick said.

While John Colgan and his wife, Frances, set out to raise a family—the Colgans have a baby sister, Frances. The oldest sibling, John, died in 1998—John Colgan worked as a firefighter.

Dick and Andy had not yet come into this world on the night of April 17, 1942, when their father’s hook and ladder company was summoned to a blaze at 200 West 50th St. in Manhattan.

John Colgan's James Gordon Bennett Medal.Dick Colgan

By the time the fire trucks got there, the six-story hotel was pouring smoke. Many occupants had already escaped into the street, but several were trapped. One of them, Illiani Vera Laurel, had kicked off her shoes and stood on the roof, screaming that she was going to jump.

The company extended its ladder as far as it could go, but it was about 10 feet short of the roof. Colgan hauled an extension - called a “fishbone” ladder because it consisted of spokes sticking out from a spine - up the aerial ladder and managed to hook it onto the roof. With the aforesaid 10,000 people watching, Colgan took hold of Laurel (who is described in news accounts as “buxom”) and led her to safety.

It didn’t hurt John Colgan’s new-found fame that Laurel was the ex-wife of comedian Stan Laurel, of Laurel & Hardy fame. If he knew it at the time, that didn’t stop him from going back and trying to save others.

By the time the Colgan kids were growing up on Beacon Street in Florence, their father’s firefighting career was far behind him. He’d taken a job as a draftsman at Kollmorgen by then and never talked about his old job.

When their parents were out of the house, though, the kids would sometimes go through their father's keepsakes.

“He had all kinds of weird stuff,” said Andy, citing an old pirate-style pistol and a bunch of medals.

John Colgan died in 1989 at the age of 77. His children had no idea he had won New York City’s top firefighting honor until last year, when Dick got a call from John Davis.

Davis, who owns and operates the McCarthy funeral homes in Franklin County, is a firefighting buff who belongs to the Honorary Fire Officers Association of New York. He spends a lot of time in the association’s archives and has a particular interest in the Bennett medal.

Davis was looking through a list of past recipients of the Bennett medal one day when he came upon the name “Colgan.”

“I know Dick through church and the community,” Davis said.
Soon enough, Dick, who now lives in Gill, got a call from Davis, asking if he knew someone named John Colgan who had been a New York firefighter.

“That’s my dad,” Dick said.

If the Colgan children didn’t realize the significance of the medal, Davis did.

“It’s the epitome of the New York Fire Department,” Davis told me. “I had to educate them about it.”

Among the obscure facts Davis knew was that no one had ever donated a James Gordon Bennett medal back to the Fire Department of New York. He succeeded in talking the Colgans into doing this.

Last year, the Colgan family traveled to the New York City fire training academy and made the presentation. They returned last month and spent an hour with New York City Fire Commissioner Salvatore Cassano, who now has the medal in his office.

The department has set the Bennett medal in its own display case. It sits next to a trophy donated by New York Yankees pitcher Mariano Rivera, a great admirer of the New York City Fire Department.

According to Davis, Cassano had never before handled a James Gordon Bennet medal.

“The commissioner said, ‘I wish this could have been mine,’” said Dick.

Now that they know what the James Gordon Bennett medal means, the Colgans no doubt spend some time wishing they still had it around. They are finding, however, that it is even sweeter picturing it where it is.

“He’s a piece of history right there in the wall,” Dick said. “It’s going to be there forever.”